Rael Jean Isaac

More “Trouble with Halkin”

Hillel Halkin is on his wildly veering course again. We last left him (“The Trouble with Hillel Halkin,” Outpost, Nov. 2005) announcing in “Israel After Disengagement” (Commentary, October 2005) that it had been necessary for the disengagement to take place “for the strategy behind it to be revealed as unworkable” (too expensive and too divisive to continue in Judea and Samaria). We noted that typical of Halkin, it then turned out to be workable after all – if President Bush announced that once Israel withdrew from 90% of the West Bank, the U.S would recognize the new line as Israel’s permanent border.

But now (NY Sun, January 10) it turns out the disengagement policy is pure gold. Netanyahu is eating his heart out for not supporting it to the end, in which case he could have taken up Sharon’s mantle. (There Halkin is probably right, given the man’s naked opportunism.) Far from being worried or divided, Israelis were beginning to feel optimistic that in Sharon’s unilateralism there was, writes Halkin, “a way out of the dead-end into which Oslo had plunged them.” Ehud Olmert’s task, says Halkin, is “to convince Israelis that he can carry out elsewhere what Ariel Sharon started to do in Gaza.” Too expensive? Too divisive? Halkin has forgotten all about that. After all, he wrote those words two whole months ago.

Halkin as a political analyst is simply ridiculous. The problem is that both the New York Sun and Commentary, on whom many vainly depend for sound analysis of Israeli policy, use him as their chief pundit on Israel.

Dividing Jerusalem

In permitting Israeli Arab residents of Jerusalem to vote for the Palestinian Authority Ehud Olmert is making a mockery of Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem and the repeated claim of her leaders that a united Jerusalem is Israel’s “eternal” capital.

A recent poll published in Haaretz indicates that 63% of Israelis are willing to cede parts of Jerusalem to the Arabs. IMRA (Independent Media Review and Analysis) notes that the phrasing of the question is loaded – the public was asked if it was willing to give up sections of Jerusalem “as part of a genuine peace agreement,” an “if elephants could fly” question. But it is the willingness to cede Jerusalem that is significant, not the loading of the question. If this is your land, you are not willing to give it up, even if elephants should fly. Once you are willing to surrender it, the absence of a quid pro quo quickly becomes unimportant. Look at the way Israelis, who once would have only been willing, on poll questions, to cede any territory to Arabs in return for “a genuine peace,” now are enthusiastic about relinquishing land for nothing (“disengagement”).

Gush Katif Families Abandoned

Of the 1170 families expelled from Gush Katif by the Sharon government over 400 are still living in the most temporary of arrangements: hotels, tent cities, yeshiva dormitories. More than half the families have received not a penny of the promised compensation (and many of these are still being forced to pay mortgages on the houses and businesses the government destroyed). Of the 2100 people who lost jobs, only 220 have found new ones.

Robert Aumann, 2005’s Nobel Prize winner for economics, speaking at the Herzliya Conference, declared: “The care for the deportees represents a national disgrace. This is criminal negligence…Many families have not seen one measly agora of compensation and those who have received compensation are forced to use it for their very existence.”

Hebron Mini-Disengagement

The Olmert government has dedicated itself to expelling 11 Jewish families in Hebron from their homes on Jewish-owned land that once served as an Arab marketplace. Though many media reports say that the issue involves "Palestinian homes," the land was actually purchased by the Sephardic Jewish community of Hebron 200 years ago and transferred to the present-day Jewish community. Arabs worked there for a time, but did not live there.

Shiite from Shinola

On Worldnetdaily writer/blogger Ilana Mercer mentions a little known aspect of the agreement Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice extracted from the Sharon government: In the case of a terrorist threat — a daily reality -- Israel is not permitted to shut down the crossing from Gaza into Israel located on its territory. Instead, it must wait for Washington's authorization. Moreover, the stretch separating Gaza and the West Bank -- also Israeli territory — is now terra incognita to Israelis, but not to terrorists. They are allowed to move freely between Gaza and the West bank, because Israel is no longer permitted to stop them, search their vehicles, or arrest them.

As Mercer observes, Israel has responded to these developments by turning its arrows on one of its few remaining friends, Pat Robertson. Interim Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's first act of statesmanship was not a resolution on Iran or Hamas, but a decision to suspend a joint business venture to construct a Christian Heritage Center in the Galilee.
Robertson's unforgivable action had been to say that God "has enmity against those who divide [His] land," hinting that the moribund Israeli leader's brain hemorrhage and his evacuation of Jews from Gaza were not random events. As Mercer says, "like them or not, his theological beliefs include the idea that one will reap God's wrath if one defies His wishes, as Robertson construes them. So what?"
The Robertson episode, says Mercer, "demonstrates that Israel doesn't respond appropriately to its friends or to its enemies. Against the backdrop of Iranian incitement to genocide, with the hard-Left joining that seething cesspool of a Palestinian Street to rejoice in Sharon's fate; at the dawn of the Age of Hamas and insecure borders, and in the context of a world that has defined the Jewish state in much the same terms as Ahmadinejad has ('criminal Zionist entity, colonial occupier') -- Israel still doesn't know Shiite from Shinola."